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Comment by twelve40 | Hacker News Reader

> few minutes for evacuation

The evacuation was completed in 55 seconds. People in the back were stranded/unconscious/buckled-up before the plane even stopped. The eyewitness reported (see links in my post) he had to _crawl on all fours_ out of the plane through thick smoke through a completely clear aisle. People with bags were the ones sitting immediately in the first few rows, they did not cause a congestion.

I would be pissed off as anyone if luggage grabbers killed someone, but it seems they weren't the "deadly stupidity" here? I mean, the dude just wrote the whole pompous blog post with a flashy title off an unlikely rumor?

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> I would be pissed off as anyone if luggage grabbers killed someone, but it seems they weren't the "deadly stupidity" here? I mean, the dude just wrote the whole pompous blog post with a flashy title off an unlikely rumor?

This is such flawed thinking statistically. It really doesn't matter if the luggage killed somebody here or not, it's faster to get out of the plane without luggage and there's no way to tell how fast the plane is burning from inside.

Grabbing luggage put their fellow passengers, even it was for one second, in the hands of fate. I don't know whether it killed any extra people or not, but it was deadly stupidity regardless.

> People with bags [...]

SHOULD NOT HAVE HAD THEIR BAGS. END OF STORY.

You say yourself the last survivor existed after 55 seconds. Did bag carriers cause even a two second delay? Could one extra person have crawled out from the smoke before succumbing? Perhaps that 12 year old girl?

You (and I mean anyone but if you fly I literally mean you) should not be making these sort of calculations when deciding to carry or not carry. Do not carry. Exit.

A quote from the last survivor off the plane says that the aisle in front of them was completely clear as they left. In other words, any delays that might have happened weren't actually enough to harm or kill anyone in and of themselves.

Or someone ahead of there spent several seconds pushing bags out of the aisle, and not everyone realized the speed of evacuation was being determined by obstructions. Or, not every piece of luggage causes the same slowdown, and the first piece of luggage with significant delay caused the choke point for all of those who didn't make it out. Or a dozen other scenarios. We just don't know.

90% of highway traffic jams I drive through end up having no visible cause. That doesn't mean that there was never anything in the road causing a slowdown.

I don't follow; that may mean nobody left their bags sitting in the aisle, but surely it doesn't mean there weren't delays. I've often had to wait upwards of five minutes to deplane at the end of a flight while other passengers grab their belongings, despite the aisle being clear. Bags absolutely slow things down.

(Unless that survivor meant the aisle was free from other passengers, but that ... seems like an unlikely interpretation.)

The unlikely rumor was spread on reddit as a fact for days. In fact I believed it until I saw further accounts and discussion.

Admittedly, the real stupidity here is attributed to ME. I really need to stop caring about details/"news" before some time has passed to filter out the rumors and the garbage that people produce on places like reddit.

> luggage grabbers killed someone

you are as well making completely unsubstantiated claims and only the final investigation will correctly asses the casualty from the fire and the casualty from the evacuation delay.

like, what about the guys crawling behind that last one? any passenger which suffocated unbuckled was direct result of the jam at the beginning, however few second it might have been, each single second could have been one crawler more managing to get to the front before suffocation.

> in 55 seconds

well yeah but only half passenger evacuated, and the plane was only 70% full. you can't just claim the timing was good like that, in a vacuum.

Well the OP kind of did worse. It's just a repost of the exact same text in earlier incidents.

> he had to _crawl on all fours_ out of the plane through thick smoke

Individual smoke hoods were tested in the 1980s for such eventualities but weren't adopted for cost reasons.

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